Episode 6 – A Daring Rescue is out now!

In this episode of Steamworks and Shadows, the steampunk web series, the crew of the Airship Vindus set out on a daring mission to retrieve the kidnapped Professor Lloyd from the villainous clutches of the Academiae Veritas.

Will the crew finally succeed at the mission given to them by JP Morgan? Watch and find out in this new installment of the steampunk web series!

Behind the Scenes Blog:

Greetings, Steamworks fans! This is Director Ben Watkins. I’ve decided to write out a short blog entry for some behind the scenes of Episode 6, “A Daring Rescue”, written by Joe Myers.

((SPOILERS AHEAD!))

Story Flow

The scenes were rearranged in editing to tell a more visual story. In script, the Vuitton-Coates conversation happened at the end of the episode, similar to our previous episodes where you would see Vuitton at the very end of the episode. For this episode, however, I felt that the excitement building with the cliffhanger for Judge, Gunny, Carlisle, and Tobias was very powerful, and any scene put in after that would take away from it. At first, I put the entire villainous conversation at the front of the episode, but it seemed to drag on too long. After getting some secondary opinions from the production crew, we finally settled on splitting the conversation into two parts.

Locations

All of the scenes, except the interior airship scene, were filmed in Blackwater MO. Blackwater is a small tourist town in Missouri, not far from Columbia. They have some historic buildings, and a gunfight show that happens on occasion. The Vuitton-Coates scene was filmed behind the Iron Horse Hotel, on their restaurant patio. Audio was especially difficult for that scene, since the AC unit is also on the patio. The Gunny-Judge-Umbra scene was filmed inside a grain tower next to the railroad tracks in Blackwater. The grain tower had one large open room that was great for filming. The Carlisle-Tobias-Fulgur scenes were filmed just outside the same grain tower, on the railroad tracks. Filming took longer than expected, since a train would come through Blackwater about once per hour. It sort of felt like playing street hockey, and having to grab everything and run out of the way when a car was coming.

Special FX

The effects for this episode were somewhat more difficult than other episodes, since there was a lot of things that had to be created, and made to look like they fit in the scene. First, there was Judge’s flashlight. I actually never got around to making the flashlight work for real, so I had to create a light beam in After Effects with no fancy expensive plugins. I probably spent more time learning how to do convincing light beams in three dimensions than it took to create the final effect. The lightning effects for Fulgur took from 5-8 layers of effects for each clip. It took a lot of tweaking on the lightning to make it look like it fit the scene, and didn’t stick out too much.